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This wouldn't provide determinism; it'd only hide the lack of determinism. It means that when a movie desynced, you wouldn't notice it immediately, only when starting again from the start.
It's better to at least be notified that there's a problem when it happens, rather than much later when you've finished the TAS.
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Given that there's no feedback yet other than votes, I think it's worth explaining my No vote.
I tried to watch this run but got bored pretty quickly. I understand the objective of the game, but the missions tend to be very slow and cutscene-heavy, and the nature of the map is that a lot of time there isn't much happening. It's also hard to figure out where the monkey ball is aiming much of the time, and there isn't an obvious route, so you can't really appreciate whether the TAS is doing ridiculous skips or cutting corners or just following the intended route quickly. (Compare a run of a more normal Monkey Ball game, where you can typically see the goal right from the start of the level and see the path to get there, and it's often clear why a shortcut works as soon as it happens.)
The run does seem pretty well-made and I think it would make a great addition to the Vault, but I don't think it's entertaining enough to be in Moons.
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I'd suggest going as simple as "max score runs are only vaultable in games where there's a hard limit to the score". Most games have some way to infinitely grind score, but in those that don't, it's a goal that's defined objectively enough to make for a good target. (Often this would become the 100% definition for the game, but it might have a separate definition: Wario Land 4 is a good example, with a concrete maximum score on each level but a 100% definition that doesn't require it. Of course, maximum score on Wario Land 4 would be unvaultable because you can infinitely grind score by playing levels more than once.)
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A "max score" movie reaching higher score than its predecessor can only obsolete it if it loses no time over it.
This makes "max score" no different from "fastest completion", because a fastest completion run can't be obsoleted by a run with higher score unless it completes the game at least as fast.
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theripper999 wrote:
I would argue that this is almost certainly Arbitrary Code Execution. It uses this hardware glitch to get it into a state that allows them to do damn near whatever they like with the game. It looks like it has some major inconveniences with limited inputs limiting opcodes, but there are workarounds as shown and it allows the programmer to input what they wish...so ACE. If I am wrong I am curious as to why.
I suspect this technique can be used to gain ACE, yes.
However, it isn't a hardware glitch. The code that's exploited is in the game cartridge, not the NES. There is a hardware glitch, but it's not directly relevant to the run, and the run would work the same way without it; the only reason it's mentioned is that the likely reason that the exploitable code is in the game is that it was probably an attempt to fix the hardware glitch in software. (So the game contains code to work around a hardware glitch; the glitch isn't relevant to the run, but the workaround code is buggy and the workaround code is what the run exploits. Even when using a NES that doesn't have the hardware glitch, the buggy software workaround still exists on the game cartridge and is still exploitable.)
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I looked at the code, and it seems to work (the game does indeed seem to overwrite the timeout). I haven't tested it in-game, though.
Actually finding a monster action where the monsters could hit us is difficult, but either of the first two actions on turn 2001 seem viable. (The latter would require a shopkeeper polymorphed into a xan, but we've done weirder things in the run already.)
This improvement allows us to enter the sanctum manually, or polymorph manually, on our last action of turn 2000. That decreases the number of traps on the vibrating square level that we need to be able to hit on monster turns, making it much more probable that there's a seed that works (hitting two traps is way easier than hitting three because the probabilities multiply).
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Chamale wrote:
This is the platonic ideal of an Arbitrary Code Execution run - a second of button mashing, a byte of RAM rewritten, and the game is over. It's a huge programming accomplishment, but it's not gameplay. I vote yes on this run and I think it belongs in Moons, hopefully with an accessible explanation of how this is possible. However, I don't think there's much benefit from producing more ACE videos for other NES games.
What if we had a rule that any% runs can't enter more than one input per frame? Would that break any runs other than ACE? We could still have a category using whatever controller port inputs break the game as quickly as possible, but whenever we use TAS tools to enter thousands of inputs per second its only use seems to be extreme abuse of ACE.
You don't choose when to enter inputs. The game chooses when to read inputs, and will look at what buttons are held on the controller at that point. So you have no direct control at all over how often inputs are entered.
As such, you'd need to word the rule more like "You can only change input once per frame", but then things get awkward because the game doesn't necessarily request input at the same time each frame. You could go for the old standby "You can only change which inputs are pressed at the start of vblank", which is what many emulators implement because it's convenient, but it's really arbitrary and doesn't have much resemblance to how the hardware works.
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feos wrote:
Warp wrote:
When the encode of the run could just as well be simply a screenshot of the ending screen, perhaps some fine-tuning of the definition could be in place.
I'd hate for TASes to just consists of ending screen screenshots and a note that "it can be achieved in 0.12 seconds". It would suck everything that makes speedrunning cool to watch out of it.
That reminds me of NetHack. IIRC the movie of it would be unwatchable in real time. Of course it would have lots of in-game actions and "traditional gameplay", but measuring it by real time alone can be misleading.
I think the NetHack TAS is comparable to the Sonic TASes that outrun the camera. "Traditional" gameplay's there, it's just happening so fast that the screen can't keep up (in the case of NetHack, because we can send input many times per frame, so even on frame advance you miss part of the action). Just like Sonic games can use a camhack to become watchable, we can use a hack to draw the "gameplay between the frames" (combined with slowing down the encoded) to make NetHack watchable.
For this run, the equivalent of the camhack/slow encode is the game's memory watch (Masterjun put the memory watch in the video linked from the submission for a reason). Viewing that on frame advance lets you see the puzzle that's being solved; it's not the puzzle that the developers intended to be solved, but it's a game in its own right that's present on the (game cartridge, NES) combination.
I used to play Pokémon competitively. The generation 4 Pokémon games use a 32-bit RNG for most of their random number generation. That means you can generate a lot of random numbers (e.g. by listening to the pitch of Chatot's cry, which is randomized), put them into a brute-forcing program, and discover what the RNG seed is. Then you can start planning out from there to try to end up with competitively powerful Pokémon; the RNG seed is stable enough to be manipulated in realtime. Is that intended gameplay? No, it isn't (the Pokémon Company International became aware of the technique when people started using it competitively, and gave the strong impression that they disapproved of its use in tournament preparation but couldn't figure out a way to ban it, as it was achieved entirely via normal controller inputs and could in theory happen by chance). Despite being unintended, is it gameplay? I'd argue it is; after a while I was having more fun with that than with the intended gameplay of the games, plotting out an RNG route to make the best use of your random numbers without hours of waiting was a puzzle in its own right and a game of its own (and it also ended up providing a use for many lesser-used Pokémon). Is it something that's watchable from an unmodified encode? No, it isn't, you basically need a separate screen listing what random results will generate in the near future to make pretty much any of my actions while doing it explicable.
I'd argue that the situation here isn't much different. There are multiple games on the cartridge, some of which are intended, some of which aren't. The unintended games, being unintended, have a pretty terrible user interface, so a traditional encode isn't an entertaining form in which to watch them. I think it is possible to make an entertaining encode (although it'd be a lot longer than just playing through the game in realtime), just like the existing submission text is already entertaining.
I think it might be a good idea to update the rules for Moons to permit runs that are entertaining when displayed in the correct way, even if a traditional view of what's happening on screen isn't enough to appreciate how they work. That would solve the problem with this game, too (and sidestep any questions about whether any categories are completed and whether gameplay is involved).
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A thought experiment: suppose a game cartridge has multiple modes (say, 1-player and 2-player play), but you have an ACE glitch that can be done anywhere, even the title screen. Is this a completion of the 1-player or 2-player game mode? Does it matter if you ACE the relevant bits of memory to specify which game mode you're playing?
I think what this run is demonstrating is that there's a conceptual problem with the whole notion of completing a game. The game has internal rules for determining whether it's complete or not, but we're using glitches to go outside the internal rules of the game entirely, and as a result the game's definition of when it's completed or not doesn't make sense.
With a general-purpose ACE glitch like this, we can say confidently "no matter how you define completing the game, no matter how you define what game mode we're in, it doesn't matter, we can do anything from anywhere". So a demonstration of the glitch starting from the title screen is sufficient to show that we can pull off the same glitch while actually playing the game.
FWIW, I see problems with ThunderAxe's definition, too: suppose the game stored a value representing the game mode somewhere which was inevitably executed as part of the glitch, and suppose that the game mode for the title screen happened to correspond to an instruction that crashes the NES. In that case, we wouldn't have ACE from the title screen (the NES would just crash) – but we would have ACE as soon as the game started normally! I don't think that situation is any conceptually different from this one, but it would lead to a different outcome under ThunderAxe's definition, which implies a mistake in the definition.
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How should I interpret the "Did you find this movie entertaining?" question on the workbench?
In particular, if I found something about the submission entertaining that wouldn't be visible in an encode (e.g. the submission notes, or the memory watch during the game), but nothing visible in an unmodified encode is entertaining, should the vote be Yes or No?
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kuja killer wrote:
umm, is the emulator your using one that allows all 255 opcodes ??
because NES does "not" have STX and STY.... not until SNES at least :|
There are 256 possible bytes that can be interpreted as instructions. Some of them are undocumented/disallowed but they will nonetheless do something on an actual NES.
Some of the opcodes in question are unusable (due to having an effect on an actual NES that's useless or actually harmful). Some of them are unstable (they won't act reliably across different NESes, or sometimes even on a single NES). However, some of them, by chance, happen to do something useful. So you can use them for ACE if you want to.
All that said, 86 STX and 84 STY are official, documented, supported opcodes; I don't think any undocumented opcodes are used in the payload of the TAS. Perhaps you had the NES confused with a different console?
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It depends on what the timer is like for loss with a full column. It seems plausible that after a sufficiently long time has passed, you wouldn't be able to form the match in a column quickly enough after it unburns (especially if this is happening in multiple columns at once); it's got to take at least three frames to move a meteo (tap old location, tap new location, release), and you have to move two meteos in the worst case, so that's six frames per column. Now do that somewhere like Hevendor, which has a large number of columns and doesn't let you make any hovering-meteo barriers to make it safe to not bother with a column for a while; you'd have to continuously rotate through the columns, making sure that no two columns ever unburned at once (or that if they did, you could manipulate a horizontal match involving them), as I'm pretty sure the late-game death timer is too short to make matches separately in every column.
If it's possible to max out the score counter on Hevendor, it'll almost certainly take a lot of luck manipulation to do so.
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Patashu wrote:
I'd love to see a category that takes on Deluge mode, since that's where the real challenge is, but I'm not sure what the category would be - max score, 32 planets sounds intense. 'fastest max score' might be more swallowable, and entertaining enough for moons.
Maxing every planet is clearly the "correct" category (perhaps also including unlocking every planet along the way, rather than using SRAM? That'd add interest from managing the rare metals). I'd be entertained, at least; the way you reach a maximum score for the planet can vary somewhat from planet to planet (the exception would be if there are any planets which require a very slow strategy – Hevendor is an obvious possibility for that due to its excessively simple mechanics – but more commonly you're scoring so fast that the score counter can't keep up). I'm also curious as to whether there are any planets where maxing out the score counter is impossible; if so, then trying to score as much as possible could be a very difficult optimisation problem. The resulting run might end up in Vault, but I wouldn't care; it's an obvious 100% definition, so it'd be acceptable, and seeing the strategies would be valuable.
Deluge is likely to be more interesting than Star Trip for someone who knows the game, because Star Trip is dominated by RNG about how badly the AI decides to screw up. When you're playing the game as a human, it's basically about trying to survive until the AI doesn't, which you don't have much control over (when the AI dies, it's typically for some silly/pointless reason rather than because you filled their screen, something which the AI can often survive!).
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I believe a 100% run would pick up all the cosmetic upgrades. Many of them are placed in awkward places to serve as optional goals to aim for, which is sort-of the point of a 100%. Sure, they don't do anything useful towards a run, but that's fairly common with upgrades-that-contribute-towards-a-100%.
I'm very much in favour of categories which lead to a mix of techniques; that's why I think IGT-including-damage is a good category. Some levels will prefer to be completed directly to avoid the 3s penalties, others would want the wall clips, and it'd serve as a good "main category" for people who want to know what the game is like. Damageless IGT is fairly pointless; you'd want to use real time for a damageless run.
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BTW, in-game time is a category missing from the list above. I think it might be a good compromise between "phase through the wall and run to the goal every level" and the potential waiting times of damageless.
FWIW, I think a varied category list that showed off most of what the game had to offer might be any%-no-training, IGT-with-training, 100%.
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Voted no for entertainment, for the same reasons as on the other run. I do, however, believe that one of the runs should be published.
I think it makes more sense to publish the run without the training levels, because I believe this game can easily support multiple categories (and that alternative category choices would be more entertaining than the any%), and placing the training levels in a pure any% seems weird compared to placing them in a longer game. That said, if the alternative publication is one which can't zip along the walls of the training levels for whatever reason, that might be a reason to include them in the any%. (That said, given that I believe the any% to be unentertaining to watch – although very interesting to read about – leaving out the training levels may be required by Vault rules.)
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I was the first No vote.
I think this run is an amazing technical achievement and should be published on that basis. I also found it very repetitive to watch; the intended gameplay is almost entirely missing (with the exception of Cloud 3, which is done in something approximating the intended fashion), and "clip through wall, go to the closest (intended or OoB goal area), clip back into goal area" gets tedious pretty quickly. As such, a pure any% seems like the wrong category for this game.
There's definitely space for a no-damage run alongside this one, I think; it'd look pretty much entirely different, but would likely show off TAS-level precision in an entirely different way. (It would, of course, be much longer). Other possibilities include an in-game time run (taking damage costs +3 seconds, so this would reduce the number of clips that were useful), or a 100% pickups run (potentially too similar to this one?)
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Matslo123 wrote:
ais523 wrote:
Matslo123 wrote:
P.S In Iji 1.6 only the first sector can be done on reallyjoel's dad difficulty. After that there is a barrier blocking the way. I have TASed the first sector https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCGjinbDSL0
Isn't there some rule in the description of the difficulty that says you're supposed to kill every enemy to take the barrier down? (IIRC that isn't actually implemented because the developer knew it was impossible, but I'd expect a TAS to at least try.) You can see the same message on the screen, "100% kills required", when you reach the barrier.
Even walking to all of the areas of sector 1, let alone killing the enemies would take more than 2 minutes. You only have 2 minutes to do it so doing a legit TAS would be impossible. I don't see a point in only killing like the first 10 enemies and then dying to the time limit.
Well, it would serve as a good explanation of why the difficulty is impossible, and it might be interesting to see how far you could get. I guess the category would be "maximum kills within the time limit".
Walking to the barrier is less interesting because it doesn't look all that different from a regular run of the game.
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Matslo123 wrote:
P.S In Iji 1.6 only the first sector can be done on reallyjoel's dad difficulty. After that there is a barrier blocking the way. I have TASed the first sector https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCGjinbDSL0
Isn't there some rule in the description of the difficulty that says you're supposed to kill every enemy to take the barrier down? (IIRC that isn't actually implemented because the developer knew it was impossible, but I'd expect a TAS to at least try.) You can see the same message on the screen, "100% kills required", when you reach the barrier.
The very highest difficulty level of this game is a joke, and believed to be impossible even with TAS. (Someone investigated it using cheats to make it through the first level, and IIRC discovered that the author hadn't bothered programming the second, because the first was literally impossible.)
The highest non-joke difficulty level would likely be worth seeing, though.
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This entertained me, so I voted Yes.
One concern I had watching it is that it's unclear how this would differ from an unassisted speedrun (but I haven't seen one of those for this game). It feels like it could look the same, but maybe not? However, given the cube bounces don't seem to be an intentional part of the game, presumably they'd be too hard to get consistently without tools, providing the difference we need. (They should be part of the game, though! It's a very fluid form of movement.)
The levels also started to get a bit repetitive near the end of the run, but not quite by enough to bore me.
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dwangoAC wrote:
This is the wrong place for this but I haven't made a dedicated thread just yet - I would like to solicit a Celeste TAS for SGDQ 2019 and I think an All Berries or 114% or whatever category is ideal for this. I know there's some questions about what a "more complete" run might look like but I'm just throwing it out there that I'd love to see it happen. TGH is on board with attending to provide commentary. Thoughts on the viability of that?
The two most viable full-completion categories are All Red Berries and All Stages / All Hearts. All Red Berries has less overlap with the categories already shown at GDQ, though, so would likely be the best choice. 100% is basically All Red Berries + completing the B-sides (which you have to do most of anyway for ARB) and C-sides (already shown at a GDQ), so it'd be very comparable to All Red Berries but a little longer. 114% is probably a bad idea, because it's basically "complete the game, then do it again deathless", and deathless isn't that interesting in a TAS (but would be rather time-consuming). That said, you could probably add the secret gold berry as a donation incentive; that's the only really new content in 114% over 100%.
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When doing 114%, does anything force you to complete the A-sides on the first run through? You need the heart and cassette, but I can't see any reason to actually complete the stage until after the gold berries have been unlocked.
That said, you'd be playing all the B-sides twice, and some hearts come so late in their levels that you'd be playing most of those twice, too.
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I think Vaultability is only relevant when actually planning to accept a submission to Vault.
I agree that this submission cannot be accepted unless it meets the entertainment standard for Moons. (I haven't watched it, and don't know how entertaining it is.) If it does meet that standard, though, I don't see why similarity to the any% would be a reason to pick that run over this one; as long as a run is being published to Moons, it should be the most entertaining of the possible options (as that's what Moons is for, maximising entertainment.)
I believe that TASvideos should also host all TAS records for any% and 100%, and thus if this movie is published to Moons, the less entertaining any% should be published to Vault alongside it (showing the speed record).